


all i need darling (is a life in your shape)

by tessellated



Category: Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Multi, Post-Book 03: Oathbringer, they are soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 13:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20098132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessellated/pseuds/tessellated
Summary: Kaladin has a nice day in Urithiru with Bridge Four. Adolin crashes and implements the least subtle seduction of all time. Kaladin is reluctantly seduced.





	all i need darling (is a life in your shape)

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first ever work of fanfiction. these three have lodged themselves in my brain. hot take: if branderson didn't want me to think kaladin and adolin are in love then they should stop thinking about how much they love each other. the title is from strawberry blonde by mitski and i formatted it like that because i wanted to contribute to the format's meme-ification. i love attention so if you like the story, please tell me so very loudly in the comments.

Kaladin pushed himself up on his elbows, squinting his eyes against the rare sunlight. He laid on a cloth stretched over the ground of one of Urithiru’s terraces. Work on figuring out how to operate the massive fabrial was closer than it had ever been to being done, but the terraces were still largely unused, except the few overrun by scholars, inventors, and scribes. Today Bridge Four had co-opted one for personal use.

Kaladin surveyed his friends with an odd look on his face, it would be stern and unsmiling on most people, but for Kaladin was the mark of serenity. There was a relaxation of the tension usually carried in his brow and a lovely softness in his eyes. 

Lopen could be seen zipping through the air, hollering loud enough so that an amused Rock could still hear his jokes from his position leaning on the terrace railing. Together they had hefted a pot of stew onto the terrace. Teft was in a similar position to Kaladin, watching his men have a well-earned day of relaxation. He caught Kaladin’s eyes for a second, smiling, before turning back to shout at Lopen, who had just smacked the back of his head while he wasn’t paying attention. Sig and Lyn were arguing about something quietly.

The sun streamed through cracks in the usual thick layer of clouds and cut through the customary cold of Urithiru. It was still weather that necessitated a jacket, but it seemed like a waste to not appreciate a bit of sun. Bridge Thirteen was watching over Dalinar and his family-- except for Renarin, who was talking quietly to Rlain. For the first time in a while, Kaladin let himself relax, flopping back down on the ground with his eyes closed.

A few moments later, however, a figure blocked out the sun and the coldness of the shade was much less comfortable. Kaladin grumpily cracked his eyes open to see a smiling Adolin standing above him.

Kaladin grunted his displeasure and frowned dramatically at him. Adolin seemed to think this was funny, but it did have the intended impact of making him move.

“You’re adorable, bridgeboy,” he said, moving to sit down on the strip of fabric next to Kaladin. Kaladin pointedly closed his eyes again and did not move to accommodate Adolin’s presence.

Adolin snorted and grabbed the cloth, playfully shoving Kaladin to one side. “Budge over, these are new trousers and I don’t want them to get dirty!”

Kaladin found himself smiling.

With body heat leaking through both layers of their trousers where their hips touched it was easy for Kaladin to remember the Shadesmar, Adolin’s soft touches on his elbow, helping him across the sea of beads... Adolin almost dying. It’s painfully easy to remember the moment Kaladin realized he needed to save Adolin as more than just a fulfillment of his oath to Dalinar, his oath to Syl. He needed to save him more than he needed to say the next words.

Kaladin had looked back at the times Syl had said he was close and found it was shockingly easy to come to a conclusion about what his next oath was supposed to be. He turned his head to look at Adolin. If that was the cost, Kaladin wasn’t certain he’d be ready to say it for a good long while.

“Where’s Shallan?” Kaladin asked, “I didn’t expect you two to be out of your rooms for at least a couple days.” The wedding had been beautiful, Adolin spent the entire time looking awestruck at his soon-to-be wife with Shallan looking equally smug back at him. The guards for their room that night were placed a tasteful distance away from the door, making the rumors that tore through Bridge Thirteen about how loud they were all the more impressive.

“She had some Veil business to attend to.” Adolin shrugged. “Veil gets what Veil wants and that is… _ not _me.” There was a suspicious amount of humor in his voice for a man talking about an aspect of his wife not wanting to have impressively loud sex with him.

“What do you mean?” Kaladin asked, side eyeing Adolin, who seemed somehow even more thrilled that Kaladin had taken the bait.

“Oh you know,” Adolin started dramatically, languishing in the fact that Kaladin most definitely did _ not _ ‘know’. “Veil’s got her eye on someone else. I’m too… foppish for her,” Adolin said shrugging his shoulders in their stylishly tailored military jacket. “Good for a drinking buddy, not good for a lover. She prefers the noble, grumpy type. Another thing that makes her a good drinking buddy-- we have _ remarkably _ similar taste.” 

Adolin throws the words like a challenge. He was still sitting while Kaladin reclined, his head facing forward, eyes affixed off the edge of the terrace. There was plausible deniability built into his language, an out for Kaladin to claim obliviousness, but even then there was just barely enough room for that. Anyone with ears and a functioning brain could figure out who he meant.

Gavilar did good in marrying Navani, even if it didn’t do much-- none of the Kholins knew the meaning of the word subtlety.

“Funny what gets brought up over drinks.” The words were quiet, almost a whisper.

Adolin finally looked back at Kaladin and Kaladin was almost paralyzed by the tenderness he saw in his blue eyes. Any doubts Kaladin might’ve had about what this all means are obliterated. Plausible deniability clung to the tiniest thread.

It felt like a fist has gripped itself behind Kaladin’s collarbone, blocking out and words or air that would like to escape. He couldn’t seem to find a response so he laid there, frozen and silent. 

Adolin took it upon himself to interpret Kaladin’s silence.

“Okay then,” he said, pressing his palms into the ground and swiftly standing up. He brushed his hands against his trousers, trying to clear off any dirt that had clung to him. He cleared his throat quietly. “I hope you have a good day Kal. You deserve nice things.” And then he turned as if to walk away.

Kaladin made a helpless noise low in his throat, scrambling to his feet. He frantically grabbed Adolin’s elbow, a twisted mirror of the gentle touch Adolin had offered him when he needed it in the Shadesmar. Realizing his hold was too rough Kaladin pulled away, bringing his hand to rub against the front of his thigh as Adolin turned back to face him.

The hurt in Adolin’s eyes from his perceived rejection slowly faded as he searched Kaladin’s face, watching his mouth work with unsaid words. 

The moment dragged for long seconds, the foot and a half between them was too close to be normal but too far to be intimate, too far to be in range for any sort of _ action. _

Adolin sucked in a breath, looking confused and anxious about Kaladin’s reaction.

“Kal?” Adolin said, voice filled with the most unbearable hope.

Kaladin stepped forward.

Adolin sucked in a breath. His eyes flitted back and forth between Kaladin’s eyes. He hadn’t summoned Syl for a while so they were a deep brown.

“Kal I--” Adolin started.

Kaladin cut him off with a hand on his jaw that drew him up into a hesitant kiss. In the beginning there was more fervor than strategy so the kiss was just a press of dry lips together. Adolin made an aborted noise into Kaladin’s mouth before quickly acclimating himself. 

Kaladin had some experience with Tarah, but it soon became clear who had more skill between them as Adolin wove one arm around Kaladin’s waist and the other into his hair. Kaladin gasped sharply as Adolin nipped at his lower lip.

They broke away only for air, still pressed against each other as they puffed breaths into the tiny space between them. Like the sun from the clouds, a smile broke across Adolin’s face and Kaladin let his forehead clunk down to press against the princeling’s. Adolin scratched lightly at Kaladin’s scalp.

A sudden wolf whistle brought them both from their reverie as they were made slowly aware of the crowd they had amassed.

Syl alighted herself on Kaladin’s shoulder. “It’s about storming time!” she exclaimed.

“Syl!” Kaladin found himself chastising, aghast. Adolin had an amused but perplexed look on his face.

“What did she say?” He asked, using a low voice to justify moving back in close to Kaladin.

“Nothing,” Kaladin muttered as Syl giggled. The raucous applause still hadn’t let up.

“Wha-- Kal, are you _ blushing? _” Adolin asked, tone simultaneously amazed and teasing. Kaladin scowled, pulling away from the chuckling Adolin.

“No,” he said, his face burning with the force of his blush. He crossed his arms, putting another physical barrier between them.

“Ah, there he is, the most dour man in all of Roshar.” Adolin slipped his hands down Kaladin’s arms in order to take his hands in his own. One at a time he brought them to his mouth and gingerly kissed his thick scarred knuckles. He then dropped them and brought his hands up to wrap around the juncture between the back of Kaladin’s head and his neck, fingers tangled in his dark hair, thumbs pressed to either side of his strong jaw.

Adolin used this hand-hold to steer a willing Kaladin downward so he could press an equally tender kiss to the furrow of his brow.

He pulled away, self-satisfied and smug after a quick once over of Kaladin’s face.

“That is _ definitely _ a blush.”

Even for someone as stubborn as Kaladin, there was a point where you had to admit you had lost. Terribly. Kaladin let a smile sluggishly make its way across his face, feeling the weight of the sun on his forehead and the equally heady feeling of Adolin’s affection. 

The smile didn’t stop until he was completely grinning and Adolin, transfixed, was blushing just as heavily. Evi’s effect on his coloring also meant that the dusty pink showed more strongly on his cheeks.

“Why Adolin, are you _ blushing _?” Kaladin asked in an obnoxious caricature of Adolin’s highborn affect, his shoulders shaking with laughter.

Adolin, looking somehow both stricken and smitten, closed the gap between them once again, seemingly overcome with the need to feel that smile pressed against him. Kaladin was more than happy to oblige, looping his strong arms around Adolin, his hands coming to rest happily on the small of his back.

“Seriously? You guys are going to do this _ here _?” Renarin, usually quiet, finally spoke up to make his objections known. “If I have to endure one more minute of my brother attempting to suck the lips off Captain Kaladin I think I might retch!” Though this later statement was nominally directed to the rest of Bridge Four, it was still easily loud enough to be heard by Adolin and Kaladin.

Adolin pulled away regretfully, visibly noting that Kaladin’s blush was back in full force. Without breaking Kaladin’s hold on him Adolin shuffled them around so he could make a rude gesture at his brother and the other assorted bridgemen who hadn’t taken their cues to turn away. This surprised a barked laugh out of Kaladin, which shocked him just as much as the people around him.

“A full smile _ and _a laugh? Shallan’s going to regret that she let me come seduce you without her.” Adolin beamed. “I know today is your day with your men, but would you like to go on an outing, with us, tomorrow?” Adolin asked, somehow still nervous, even with his lips scrubbed red from kisses.

“Oh no, I would hate that. I thought this was a once and done sort of thing,” Kaladin said dryly, raising an eyebrow and licking his bottom lip, drawing attention to its thoroughly kissed look.

Adolin huffs. “I was _ going _ to assess your interest and then declare my intention to court you properly, bridgeboy, but then _ you _decided the best way to express you interest was to kiss me! What was I supposed to do? Refuse?” Adolin rolls his eyes at the smirk on Kaladin’s face. “Smug bastard,” he said affectionately.

“I have a meeting to go to with your father in the morning, and I’m supposed to be training the new squires after that, but with Teft and Lopen here I can probably skip out.” He crossed his arms with a shrug.

“We’ll have lunch,” Adolin supplied. “I’ll find you after the meeting.” He turned and walked two steps, but paused and turned back around.

Very deliberately he made the two strides to cross to Kaladin and drew him in for a kiss, far more chaste than their others. “I am glad you’re on board, bridgeboy,” he whispered, quiet and genuinely.

With that, Adolin was off, leaving Kaladin with a brain full of prospects and a vaguely dazed look on his face. He stared blankly at the door into the tower for several long moments before turning away.

“You were jealous.” An impish voice started Kaladin out of his daze as Syl moved to put herself in his line of sight. She had been oddly quiet while Adolin was present. “When you went on those outings with the two of them together. You enjoyed both of their companies separately but hated seeing them together romantically. You were jealous.” She says it in a tiny voice even though no one else can hear her. 

Looking back on it, it made sense. His overly aggressive banter, his insistence on being their guard, his anger-- disproportionate to minute slights, if there even were any. 

The dissonance in his thought and action had even crossed his own mind, it had occurred to him that his feelings around them didn’t make sense. With the last puzzle piece slotted nicely in his brain, the whole mess came apart with startling clarity.

“Of course,” he muttered quietly, more as a response to his own thoughts than to Syl. “Nothing to be jealous about now, though.” He looked at the door, back toward Bridge Four and then smiled, just slightly, for himself as the clouds cleared away once more, revealing nothing but blue sky.


End file.
